Life goes on in wake of blasts

Page Tools

Barely a day after New Delhi's triple terrorist bomb blasts
killed 61 people, the same marketplaces that were strewn with
bodies were again bustling with life.

Such is India's capacity to cope with the reality of horror that
some ask whether it's a model for life in the age of terrorism, or
just a callous, careless country inured to its own citizens'
pain.

Saturday's attack on shoppers stocking up for the festival of
Diwali briefly dominated domestic news coverage, but it won't be
long before local politics again takes over the front pages. If
India's own media lose interest, can the rest of the world be far
behind?

Police responded by launching a series of raids on the city's
guesthouses in search of Pakistani illegal immigrants. While
Pakistan-based Muslim terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba head
the list of suspects, police had no warning of the attacks, and
have yet to reveal any evidence against specific extremist
groups.

India claims 50,000 of its people have died in terrorist-related
violence since 1994, and citizens in areas such as Kashmir have
lived for decades with almost Iraqi levels of bloodshed.

But drawing the line between a terrorist on the one hand, and on
the other an Assamese separatist in the country's remote
north-east, or armed Maoists running their own administrations in
neglected tribal districts, is more than a mere exercise in
semantics. In India, violence is a political weapon that all sides
- including the state itself - use.

When it comes to natural disasters, such as the Kashmir
earthquake, a recent study published in the respected Economic
and Political Weekly found India's own media to be deeply
insensitive. In a 15-year period it found disasters made the cover
of India Today magazine only 22 times, compared with 40 for
sport and 288 for politics.

Explanations for India's insensitivity to its own travails range
from its huge size, to poverty and the caste system. The Nobel
laureate and author V.S. Naipaul surmised that caste created a
partition in the Indian mind between the individual and society as
a whole.

But perhaps the explanations are simpler. In a country of about
1 billion people there is never a shortage of bad news. Bomb blasts
supersede train wrecks, which in turn supersede earthquakes and
floods.

With 240 million people living below the poverty line, and 15
million of them crowding into cities like Delhi, the struggle for
survival takes precedence over fears of death.

Ahmrit Khandelwal is a trader whose shop is metres from the
blast site. On Saturday he was covering the dead bodies, but
yesterday was again open for business. As he put it: "What has
happened has happened. Why should we remember it? Tomorrow is
Diwali, our biggest festival. Our lives are saved and we [are]
happy."

SPONSORED LINKS

More news

1130720481942-smh.com.auhttp://www.smh.com.au/news/world/life-goes-on-in-wake-of-blasts/2005/10/31/1130720481942.htmlsmh.com.auSydney Morning Herald2005-11-01Life goes on in wake of blastsChristopher Kremmer in New DelhiWorld